A reveille call to the slumbering Anglosphere

Edmund Burke, who wrote the greatest British encomium to conservatism, was a Whig. Now Daniel Hannan, who is a Tory (an ultra-sceptic MEP, in fact), has written a great encomium to Whiggery. With the eloquence of Macaulay or Trevelyan – both of whom are liberally quoted here – Hannan sweeps us through English history to show the triumph of law-based liberty and “that total understanding which can only exist between people speaking the same tongue”. With incredible ingenuity, he finds the marks of this genius in almost everything the English have done.

I say “the English”. Hannan has no race theory – pointing out, for example, how “English” oriental people can be in Hong Kong, Singapore or India – but he certainly believes in the Anglo-Saxon tradition. The Norman Conquest was, in his view, a “calamity”. It is because of Saxon Witans, and Saxon law, and Kipling’s Saxon yeoman who “stands like an ox in his furrow” demanding fair dealing, that we are a free people today, he thinks. He even complains that the Normans, being more snooty, let us keep plain Saxon words – cow, pig, lamb – for living animals, but imposed their own French-derived ones for the cooked version – beef, pork, mutton.

There are wonderful passages here. One shows how – despite having had what was called the Peasants’ Revolt – the English were never peasants at all (they had property rights). Another explains how our freedom to make our wills in favour of anyone we wish upholds the rights of property by extending them beyond death. On the Continent, the law makes you leave things equally to your children.

But though this book is ultra-patriotic, it is also global. “Let observation, with extensive view,/ Survey mankind from China to Peru”, wrote Dr Johnson. That is what Hannan does, particularly from the latter vantage point. He is Anglo-Peruvian, brought up mainly in Peru, and this enables him to contrast a Spanish-based polity where no one believed in the rule of law with our own dear habits. He says he loves Iberian culture but, the more he knows both, “the harder it is to sustain the idea that the English- and Spanish-speaking worlds are manifestations of a common Western civilisation”.

His obsession is not England, but the Anglosphere. Out of it all – Magna Carta, the Civil War, the Glorious Revolution – came all the non-English bits – the American Revolution, for instance, and the Statute of Westminster, which relinquished British parliamentary control over Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Part of his theme is captured in the couplet from a play that convicts first performed in Sydney in 1796: “True patriots we: for be it understood/ We left our country for our country’s good” (or was it in order to beat us at cricket?).

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He shows the continuities and links to great effect. I am ashamed to say that I had not known, before reading this book, that Abraham Lincoln’s most famous phrase was invented by John Wycliffe in 1384. Wycliffe’s prologue to the earliest English translation of the Bible said: “This Bible is for the government of the people, for the people and by the people.” Today, Hannan believes, the virtues of the Anglosphere are more secure in governments like that of Tony Abbott in Australia, Stephen Harper in Canada and John Key in New Zealand than here in Britain. Above all, the love of liberty is more fully expressed and protected in the US Constitution than by our own parliamentary sovereignty in its current, debased form. He quotes with approval de Tocqueville: “The American is the Englishman left to himself.” He argues for a revised British Bill of Rights – 1689 with modern knobs on – to Americanise our constitution, and thus, paradoxically, make it more English.

It is all such a tremendous read that I feel churlish to say that I do not, strictly speaking, agree with it as history. Its account of ever-increasing freedom, for example, cannot properly be squared with the royal drive for control that lay behind the English Reformation. Indeed, as Hannan half acknowledges, the persecution of Catholics was a constant theme of more than 300 years of our history, going far beyond a reasonable suspicion of papal power.

But I do not want to complain too much because – as Hannan himself quotes Renan – “Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation.” The way Hannan gets ours wrong works to the good. Even if it is not always true that we have upheld liberty and the law, it helps us to do better if we believe that this is our special role in the world. In all countries, at all times, there are a shocking number of people who want to diminish freedom.

At least, in the Anglosphere, they will not usually succeed without a fight. “We should remember who are we are,” he cries. I am happy to play along, even if it might involve a bit of false memory syndrome. Daniel Hannan is right, surely, that certain trends in the world favour what he advocates. One interesting example is how the Republic of Ireland, which so long chose to define itself by how anti-British it was, is now a much more relaxed part of the Anglosphere.

Another is that the prolonged agonies of the eurozone, after its apparently successful beginning, are showing the world how painful and foolish it is to impose a new order upon disparate nations. We few, we happy few, by contrast, have become many, and spread Albion’s seed freely all over the place. We can win, if only, when Daniel Hannan blows reveille, we weren’t so sunk in swinish slumber.